What in God’s Name Is Happening in Politics?

As we struggle to make sense of the resurrection of Donald J. Trump and the supporters of Pierre Poilievre, words seem to fail us. Terms like “fascism” and “authoritarianism” and “populism” are frequently bandied about, but to me, they’re too generic. They don’t adequately reflect how conservatives in North America seek and hold power.

The United States and Canada are dealing with movements that claim power on both secular and religious grounds, though their claims are based on very doubtful evidence.

The momentous April 20 meeting between U.S. Vice-President JD Vance and Pope Francis on what turned out to be the last day of Francis’s life offers valuable insight into a politics that invokes divine authority without being very religious.

In a recent article in the Guardian, Princeton professor Jan-Werner Müller pointed out that Vance, an adult convert to Catholicism, has a very different view of Christian love from that of the late pope.

Vance, Müller wrote, is a “far-right populist who has smuggled nationalism into what he touts as the correct notion of Christianity.” But this was not the pope’s Catholicism.

Francis strove for a “fraternity open to all.”

In a February letter to U.S. bishops, Pope Francis criticized Trump’s policies on migration, which the pope saw as a rejection of Christ’s “universal love.”

“Christians know very well,” Francis wrote, “that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.... The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

That was a shot at Vance, who has used the Latin term ordo amoris to define Christian love as applying first to one’s own family, then community, then nation, and eventually — maybe — to all humanity.

It was also a shot at the half-baked heresy of “Christianism,” which tries to ride Christianity’s coattails by exploiting its rhetoric for political ends.

Today’s “Christianism” is a form of “civilizationism,” which Rogers Brubaker, a sociology professor at the University of California, described in a 2017 Foreign Affairs article as a new political discourse expressing the rising populism of the far right.

Civilizationism, Brubaker wrote, “is a paradoxical combination of ‘identitarian’ Christianity, secularism, philo-Semitism, Islamophobia, and even some elements of liberalism such as support for gender equality and gay rights.” It sees the world as a “clash of civilizations,” and solving those conflicts requires rulers invoking some kind of divine authority over the ruled, even over unbelievers.

Belonging, not believing

To invoke Christianity in civilizationist discourse, Brubaker argued, “is a matter of belonging rather than believing, a way of defining ‘us’ in relation to ‘them.’ If ‘they’ are Muslim, then ‘we,’ the Europeans, must in some sense be Christian.”

Vance is clearly a Christianist, not the kind of Christian Pope Francis would have welcomed, and neither are the Christianists who composed and promoted Project 2025.

That document uses Christianity as a political instrument, defining who “belongs” and who does not. It excludes “cultural Marxists” and promotes Christian nationalism as the basis of public policy.

But that policy is thoroughly secular, merely decorated with religious rhetoric. It wants to impose its values on the whole society, privileging some (such as white males) while excluding others (such as women and people of colour).

It is disturbingly obsessed with people’s sexuality and sexual behaviour — not because God might be offended, but because it might reduce the birth rate and put Christianism at a numerical disadvantage in wars against other civilizations.

Christianism sees itself as under threat, and not just by Muslims. That’s why Trump issued an executive order in February establishing a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.”

This bias, Trump claimed, had been expressed by the Joe Biden administration by forcing “Christians to affirm radical transgender ideology against their faith.” Biden, Trump said, also “sought to drive Christians who do not conform to certain beliefs on sexual orientation and gender identity out of the foster-care system.”

Always exclusionary, never universal

The word “catholic” is Greek for “universal,” but Christianism is always exclusionary, never universal. Christianism’s true believers can also reject their religious critics as yet more “cultural Marxists.”

And that would certainly include Christians who endorse the social gospel that inspired Canadians like Tommy Douglas. Fighting for medicare, social justice and better pay and working conditions is an abomination to Christianism.

Canada has acquired its share of Christianists, though they tend to be marginal. The Christian Heritage Party, which explicitly wants to run Canada as a conservative Christian theocracy, gained just 10,165 votes in this week’s election.

Christianism seems not to have been part of the Conservative party base in the 2025 federal election, and in January the Christian Heritage Party directly condemned the Conservative leader.

“Pierre Poilievre supports abortion on demand; he supports same-sex marriage. He has done nothing to stop doctor-assisted suicide. He will not withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement or the globalist WHO,” said Christian Heritage Party leader Rod Taylor in a March 2025 interview with Paul Tuns, the editor of a right-wing publication on “family life.”

“He did not vote against Bill C-4, that awful legislation that criminalizes parents for guiding their children in regard to sexual choices. He criticized his own MP, Arnold Viersen, for expressing pro-life, pro-family views.”

On the provincial level, however, Christianism has seen some success. The Take Back Alberta movement does appear to express Christianist values and has been a formidable force in Alberta politics since its founding in 2021.

As long as Christianism influences events in U.S. politics, we will hear echoes of it here in Canada. But so far Trump has been a kind of political vaccine, protecting us against Christianism in particular and the far right in general. Christianists may exert influence in some communities, but the vast majority of us want nothing to do with them — least of all the 13.5 million Canadian Catholics mourning the death of Pope Francis.

If we’re lucky, Canadians will stay immune to Christianism long after Trump has gone.